The rules for allowing
witnesses for the prosecution were lax; those for rejecting witnesses
for the defence were rigid. Jews, Moriscos, and servants could give
evidence against the prisoner but not for him, and the same rule applied
to kinsmen to the fourth degree. The principle on which the Inquisition
proceeded was that better a hundred innocent should suffer than one
guilty person escape. Indulgences were granted to any one who
contributed wood to the pile. But the tribunal of the Inquisition did
not itself condemn to the stake, for the Church must not be guilty of
the shedding of blood. The ecclesiastical judge pronounced the prisoner
to be a heretic of whose conversion there was no hope, and handed him
over ("relaxed" him was the official term) to the secular authority,
asking and charging the magistrate "to treat him benignantly and
mercifully." But this
[62] formal plea for mercy could not be entertained by the civil power;
it had no choice but to inflict death; if it did otherwise, it was a
promoter of heresy. All princes and officials, according to the Canon
Law, must punish duly and promptly heretics handed over to them by the
Inquisition, under pain of excommunication. It is to be noted that the
number of deaths at the stake has been much over-estimated by popular
imagination; but the sum of suffering caused by the methods of the
system and the punishments that fell short of death can hardly be
exaggerated.
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